Articles in Journeys

If you’re a fan of “Goodfellas,” “The Sopranos,” and “West Side Story,” there’s a lot you’ll recognize in “A Bronx Tale,” the musical that opened last week at the Longacre Theatre.
Indeed Beowulf Boritt’s set is so realistic – the Belmont Avenue area of the Bronx – that you are surprised that the concessionaire isn’t selling cannoli.
Those are the good points – but from the start, the musical is simply awkward …

New York City during the holidays. Thoughts fall to the timeless traditions of ice skating in Central Park, viewing extravagantly decorated department store windows along Fifth Avenue, the Nutcracker, and the Rockettes Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Hall.
If you’re dreading the traditional holiday offerings, there is, however, still plenty to do in the Big Apple.
FBT Editorial Director Jonathan Spira, who serves as the magazine’s chief theater critic, looks at five …

Perhaps no theater is better than the Palace in New York City to take a step back in time to the turn of the last century, a time (as the evening’s host pointed out) when there were no mobile phones, and the very stage where no less than hundreds of luminaries performed, including Ed Wynn, the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, and Harry Houdini, the most famous illusionist of all time.
I …

A Cunning Collection of FBT News and Views
Doggy bags. Jonathan Spira checks out United’s first Polaris Lounge at Chicago O’Hare International Airport an hour before anybody else had the chance to enter. The rest of the guests were slightly confused when they arrived as they could see none of the food that was promised to them. Then, they noticed in a corner our beloved editorial director with a smug look …

MUNICH—From mid-November until Christmas Eve, Christmas markets can be found in every major city and town in many European countries including Austria, Belgium, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Today’s markets have their origins in Vienna’s December Market, which dates back to 1294, and which was followed by Christmas markets in Munich in 1310, Bautzen in 1384, and Frankfurt in 1393.
The smells of a Christkindlmarkt are addictive: Glühwein (spiced wine), scented candles, …

George Cayley was born on December 27, 1773. With his work on aeronautical engineering and fixed-wing flying machines, as well as the fact that he designed the first glider in history to carry a human, he is regarded by many to be the father of aviation.
The Wright Brothers made the first powered controlled flight, in a heavier-than-air craft, on December 17, 1903, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
The Palace Hotel, which …

The Imperial Theater, home to “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812,” which opened with a bang last Monday, never looked like this, a re-imagined Russian supper club with an entryway that resembles a Cold War bunker’s. Indeed, few theatergoers have seen something as lavish and as complicated as this, a show so complex and with so many characters that a tutorial – in the form of a song …

It was love at first sight and the most unexpected encounter I’ve ever had at a hotel. Sally, a Chihuahua mix, was living large in the reception area of the Westin Mission Hills Golf Resort and Spa, looking for a guest to adopt as part of the hotel’s pet adoption program.
Sally let me take her for a walk around the property’s beautiful grounds and it was clear that we enjoyed …

Pan Am, the nation’s unofficial flag carrier and a cultural icon, ceased operations on Wednesday (December 4) after what could only be described as a tumultuous decade both for both the airline and the airline industry. It is the second major U.S. airline to cease operations this year.
Had Frequent Business Traveler existed in 1991, some 25 years ago, that could have been the lead paragraph of the top news story …